The Legend of Bowser’s Dead Wife
I am currently working on a third part to an accidental series on Bowser that began with me guesting on a Retronauts about him. This third part will be about how the Super Mario games ended up pitting mushrooms against turtles as if they had some age-old rivalry. They don’t. But this week I’m on another Bowser-focused Retronauts — and unlike part one, which is for Patreon supporters only, this one is on the public feed. So go listen to it, but in addition to promoting it here, I’m also wanting to expand on a minor point I bring up in the episode.
I speak of Bowser’s wife, who technically does not exist.
Bowser’s lack of a mate raises questions about how he brought into existence two sets of kids — the Koopalings, who were later retconned to be not Bowser’s children, and Bowser Jr., who unfortunately still exists in the Mario canon. As a result, overeager fans have made efforts to conjure a Mrs. Bowser into existence going back to the days of Super Mario Bros. 3. She does not exist in the games, however, and we’re led to believe that for one reason or another, Bowser only has eyes for Peach.
Don’t forget that the plot of Super Mario Sunshine hinges around Bowser tricking Bowser Jr. into thinking that Peach actually *is* his mother. It’s one of the few times the series has acknowledged that Bowser’s significant other is inexplicably absent.
The infamous “I’m your mama?” sequence, where the line delivery makes it seems like Peach might actually think she really is the mother of Bowser’s son.
But there was a brief window of time when some Mario fans thought this long-lingering question was finally being answered. They were wrong, but I can’t blame them, to the point that I actually think Nintendo might have been trolling them. And because this is a story about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, it’s especially timely, as Nintendo just this weekend celebrated Mario Day with a release date for the Thousand-Year Door remake.
In early 2003, Nintendo unveiled The Thousand-Year Door at the Game Developers Conference. Because the first Mario RPG was a bit of a one-off, we didn’t have any reason to think that Nintendo would revisit Paper Mario, which was released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64. They did, however, and this second Paper Mario game retained the aesthetic, the humor and the play mechanics of the first. Also as with the original, Mario was joined in his adventures by a host of good-natured versions of common enemy characters: a Goomba wearing a Mario hat, one of the pink Bob-ombs from Super Mario 64, even a Cheep-Cheep flopping around on dry land. They all have distinct personalities, and switching between one and another is one of the elements of the game that I really enjoyed.
In The Thousand-Year Door, Mario is joined by a similar crew, but it’s a little more varied. There’s a different Goomba, a different Koopa Troopa and a different Bob-Omb, but there’s also a character who’s not a member of a readily identifiable class of Mario creature. And she looks like this.
Not a Goomba, not a Koopa Troopa, not a Shy Guy, not anything you’ve seen in a Mario game before… unless…?
Just looking at early screens from this game, with no context for who this buxom character was, diehard Mario fans on one of the gaming news websites I frequented jumped to what might seem like a ridiculous conclusion now but which made sense at the time. This female character — obviously — was the ghost of Bowser’s wife. The reasoning was fairly straightforward: She had Wendy O. Koopa’s basic mouth shape and Ludwig’s hair color and style.
That combo of a wink and a “kissy” mouth? Especially with a little heart coming off it? That’s a Wendy O. Koopa trademark. But the hairdo is a tamer, more stylized version of Ludwig’s.
She was a bigger female character, and those are still rare in the Super Mario games, but instead of thick, testudine legs, her body tapered off, suggesting a cartoon ghost. In the headcanon these people were quickly assembling, the new Paper Mario game would be delving into the mystery of Bowser’s wife by having her ghost be one of Mario’s traveling companions.
Obviously.
Again, it all seems very silly now, but the two Mario role playing games we’d gotten so far — Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario, with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga releasing later in 2003 — managed to play with series mythos in ways that only RPGs can. Super Mario RPG, for example, reinvented the Star Road, which in Super Mario World was really just a fancier-looking Warp Zone. And Paper Mario reconceptualized the Mushroom Kingdom as an explorable three-dimensional space populated by all manner of Toads. It didn’t seem completely out of left field that this new Paper Mario would do the same, maybe even expand upon the characterization Bowser got in the first Paper Mario by… oh, you know, haunting him with the wraith of his dead wife.
It’s probably not a spoiler if I tell you that this ended up not being the case. This character, we would shortly learn, is Flurrie, a wind spirit who was formerly an actress and who leaves a retirement in seclusion to help Mario in his quest. The resemblance to both Wendy and Ludwig was apparently coincidental. The game doesn’t address it, and if Bowser encounters Flurrie, he doesn’t remark on the fact that she looks like a combo of two of his children. It would all seem to be a big coincidence.
OR IS IT??
No, it is. Regardless, here’s the weird thing with Flurrie. In the Japanese version of the game, she’s named Kurauda (クラウダ), which could be rendered as “Clouda,” which would make sense because she looks like she’s made of clouds. Wind spirit, and all. However, that just happens to be very close to a name that has existed in Mario fan communities for Bowser’s wife for years: Clawdia Koopa. No, really, it was used quite often, and especially if you were reading Mario-focused websites in the late 90s and early 2000s, you may have come across a mention of Clawdia Koopa, if not fan art of her.
Clawdia seems to be an original character, created by the keeper of the Mario fan site Lemmy’s Land, which still exists today and which still has posted Clawdia’s character bio. According to the Super Mario Wiki, she dates back to at least 2002, but I think I first encountered her way before even that. Also per the wiki, an urban legend posited that a British Nintendo publication once confirmed Clawdia’s existence, with the image associated coming from a Valiant Comics page depicting a page from Bowser’s yearbook. The female Koopa character — who just looks like Bowser in drag, in the way that Minnie Mouse looks like Mickey in drag or Milhouse’s mom looks like Milhouse’s dad in drag — is not named Clawdia in the accompanying text, however.
The bottom-left portion of this comics page made the rounds, being passed off as some sort of proof of Clawdia’s existence, even though she’s visually inspired by this version of Bowser and not Nintendo’s canon model.
I suppose it’s possible that people making Mario games could have come across Clawdia Koopa while looking into what English-speaking fans were doing with their love for the series, but I’d guess it’s more likely that this was all a coincidence, with Clawdia getting her name because Bowser and other boss Koopas have claws, and Flurrie’s Japanese name coming from the fact that she’s made from clouds. All that said, the decision to make her look so much like Wendy and Ludwig is a puzzling one. There aren’t other other characters in the series who have a face like Wendy’s, for one. (Maybe Pom Pom, the female version of Boom Boom, comes the closest?) And it’s strange that Flurrie is the only companion in either Paper Mario game to apparently be a wholly original creation, when just about every other character exists to play off nostalgia for previous games.
If it really was someone at Nintendo saying “This is going to make all the nerds think Bowser’s dead wife is playable,” then that’s actually really funny.
Miscellaneous Notes
She’s not his wife, but there is a canonical female counterpart to Bowser in Madame Broode, the leader of the evil rabbit wedding planners from Super Mario Odyssey. She mirrors Bowser’s basic size and specific face shape, and I kind of imagined she’d be one of the characters to cross over into spinoff titles, but weirdly none of the Odyssey characters have done that yet. I don’t know why. But whenever the next Mario Kart comes out, I’m all here for seeing Madame Broode in the heavyweight category.
The build, the muzzle shape, the big, creased eyebrows… even the spiked bracelets. It’s like someone slipped a rabbit skin over Bowser’s body.
It was not as widespread as Clawdia, but some fan continuities back in the day had a female counterpart to Bowser named Lena Koopa. She was, of course, named after the Fiona Shaw character in the 1993 Super Mario Bros. move.
I’ve actually been a huge fan of Shaw’s ever since I saw her in that movie. She’s consistently good in everything I’ve seen her in — even the really bad Black Dahlia movie that came out in 2006. She was most recently in the new season of True Detective, and while I enjoyed her performance, I did have to fight the urge to think about Lena in the Super Mario Bros. movie every time she was on screen. So it goes.
What’s interesting in terms of the Super Mario Bros. movie and Paper Mario is that Lena is the first instance of Bowser having a right-hand woman. In the first two Paper Mario games, Browser is paired with Kammy Koopa, a female counterpart to Kamek and the only instance of Bowser having anything close to an in-game version of Lena from the movie. Bowser and Kammy have a fun, bickering rapport in Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door, but in Sticker Star and beyond she’s placed by regular old Kamek.
There’s another Mario companion in Thousand-Year Door who doesn’t look like a familiar Mario enemy, and that’s Vivian, a member of a trio of bosses who defects and joins the side of good. I suppose it’s kind of a spoiler, but the game’s end boss appears to be a similar creature to Vivian and her sisters, so Flurrie truly is the odd woman out. Also of note? Vivian is a trans character in the Japanese version of the game. This is something I’ll be elaborating on in a forthcoming mega post about Birdo. The English version elides this aspect to Vivian’s character.
One of the jokes in The Thousand-Year Door is that Luigi is having his own quest, concurrently, but the player never really sees it. We just see him at various points in Mario’s quest, always paired with his own companions. They are, in order, a Bloober who gets deep-fried along the way; a Bob-Omb named Jerry who looks like a cherry; one of the Crayzee Dayzee enemies from Yoshi’s Island; Torque, a Spike Top with a wrench where the sharp point should be; and finally Screamy, who doesn’t look like anything you see in the game. In terms of Flurrie, it’s notable that both Mario and Luigi get a partner that doesn’t follow the pattern because they’re not a common Super Mario enemy
In Japanese, Screamy is Su Kurīmi (ス・クリーミ), presumably a play on aisukurīmu (アイスクリーム), “ice cream,” so I guess he’s supposed to be some kind of ice cream creature? It might make sense, given the damsel in distress he’s out to rescue is Princess Eclair. (And the big bad of the game is termed the Chestnut King, even if he’s actually a more familiar character from the previous Paper Mario.) But included among the unused enemy sprites in the game are brown and purple-colored versions of Screamy that may have been prototypes for the Smorg enemy. Either way, there’s something unsettling about this weird creature. Even Goombella says as much when you use her Tattle ability on him: “That's Luigi’s pal, Screamy. Screamy creeps me out... I’ve never seen anyone like that. Where’s he from?”
If it seems just laughably off-brand for Nintendo to give one of its marquee characters a dead wife, don’t forget that Wrinkly Kong, Cranky Kong’s wife, has been a ghost since since Donkey Kong 64. She’s even made to playable appearances since then despite the considerable handicap of not being alive.
And finally, yes, BTW, I am very pleased with this pixel art Mrs. Bowser I adapted from Bowser’s SMB3 sprite from All-Stars. I love her instantly, and I look forward to encountering fanart of her out in the wild.